Imagine stepping into a world where innovation meets the human spirit, crafting prosthetics and orthotics that adapt as seamlessly as the body itself. That's the journey we embark upon in our latest episode, with the incredible Antonius Kuster joining us to unravel the revolution in patient care brought by digital workflow. Antonius, a seasoned trailblazer in the field, shares tales from the early days of shaping free-form surfaces and the seismic shift to today's computer-assisted marvels. Through his eyes, we witness the cultural and generational tides shifting within the industry, culminating in a heartfelt story of launching a 3D design company and the pioneering acquisition of a 3D printer that forever changed the manufacturing landscape.
We talk about software and hardware and the dance that occurs while looking for the perfect combination. Don't miss this episode there are a lot of nugget in it!
Special thanks to Coyote for sponsoring this episode.
Imagine stepping into a world where innovation meets the human spirit, crafting prosthetics and orthotics that adapt as seamlessly as the body itself. That's the journey we embark upon in our latest episode, with the incredible Antonius Kuster joining us to unravel the revolution in patient care brought by digital workflow. Antonius, a seasoned trailblazer in the field, shares tales from the early days of shaping free-form surfaces and the seismic shift to today's computer-assisted marvels. Through his eyes, we witness the cultural and generational tides shifting within the industry, culminating in a heartfelt story of launching a 3D design company and the pioneering acquisition of a 3D printer that forever changed the manufacturing landscape.
We talk about software and hardware and the dance that occurs while looking for the perfect combination. Don't miss this episode there are a lot of nugget in it!
Special thanks to Coyote for sponsoring this episode.
Hello everyone. This is the prosthetics and orthotics podcast with yours, peels and Brent right yours, how you doing man.
Speaker 2:I'm good. I'm good, how are you?
Speaker 1:It doesn't feel a little bit weird to be on the receiving side of that?
Speaker 2:It's super strange. It's super strange.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll explain a little bit later on why that happened, because yours will be introducing our guests today. But um, so yeah, man, what's what's up to still coming down off the form? Next stuff yeah.
Speaker 2:So a lot of work, a lot of interviews, people, a lot of like kind of Tidying up the end of the year kind of stuff. How about yourself?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know what's been crazy is these flexible things. You know, I know we talk about TPU and such and Really I think it's a game-changing.
Speaker 1:Regardless of the technology that you know, the body specifically for O&P is a living, breathing thing and it's moving all the time, and I believe prostheses and orthoses need to be made in that manner, and so what we've been doing lately is to see how much we can make flexible, you know, and and really push the limits, and so we're breaking a lot of rules and it's been Amazingly interesting and the feedback that we're getting back from patients is incredible.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's good. Yeah, I saw some stuff you're doing on on on LinkedIn, the last kind of leg you made. That was amazing, dude.
Speaker 1:It's, it's really wild, I can't wait to fit. It is actually for another clinician, but it's a long-term patient of of mine and so I know him pretty well, and so when I had that discussion with him, he's like, hey, hey, man, yeah, we'll try it. He said. It seems. It seems like every time we iterate it gets better for me. So he's he's kind of a guinea pig on that.
Speaker 1:But you know, what's neat is, with this added flexibility, it's almost like a little bit of a shock absorber. And so there's there's always, there's always the potential of failures, regardless of additive manufacturing or traditional manufacturing. And so what you go back to is why did it fail? And typically there's some sort of event that happens of fall, somebody gets hit. I said, you know the, the socket is run over by somebody's electric wheelchair, or the dog gets hold, you know all these things, and but one of the things that can prevent some of these failures is Flexibility, and so I think this is another interesting step moving forward in a specifically additive manufacturing is those failures that May have been happening. And and I'll be honest, you know I've had failures with the additive manufactured sockets and I've had failures with traditionally fabricated sockets, but those failures, I believe, will truly be minimized with Flexible sockets. I really do.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, we'll see. We'll see it's a. You're at the head of that dude. I think it's a really, really exciting development.
Speaker 1:So the the kicker is it's hard to design, for you know it's you've got a little, you know, not only the lattice structures thick and thin, some loading stuff, so, but I think it's an exciting time. So, we went down the rabbit hole with TPU a little bit, but who do we have on the show today?
Speaker 2:That's actually kind of funny because so Brent actually surprises me with a guess every every week. I don't know who the guess is right. That's the whole, the whole central conceit. So sometimes it's a bit kind of like I'm trying to yeah, I kind of feel through the first couple of minutes to figure out who it is. I have no idea, and this time Brent found the guess, but it's actually on Antonius Kuster and he is something I've known for a very long time.
Speaker 2:I did a keynote once for 3d printing show in 2014 or something in Germany, and he actually introduced me in and and he's part of the people that organized that air for show and stuff. So I've known him for a long time and so that's actually was a hell of a surprise just now. So so Antonius is somebody who has an eponymous company called Antonius Kuster as well, and it's a German company, and he started as a pattern pattern maker, mold maker using traditional Manufacturing techniques many years ago and then transition more and more to 3d printed patterns and moles and 3d printing, design, 3d printing as a service and also 3d scanning as a service. It was a hell of a lot of 3d scanning, consulting, 3d scanning, training, software, very difficult projects and no one else can do and also helps a lot of orthotics, orthotics and prosthetics, people with 3d scanning as well, and there's also an expert on the 3d scanning software. So, yeah, thanks so much for for coming on the show, antonius.
Speaker 3:Thanks for the invitation to join this podcast. So yeah, it's a long story where we where we started, and I'm curious about your question.
Speaker 2:Sure sure, so, first off. So, first of Wendy, you you got. You were just doing traditional Pattern making, mold making, right when you got started, though that's how you got started industry right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this is I, I. After high school I did my apprenticeship as a pattern maker, so really turning wood into the patterns for casting for foundries and design models, vacuum forming models for packaging. Later on I went into mold making for vex injection molding, for investment casting. And when I finished my apprenticeship I went into a prototype mold making company and this was in 1989 and there I saw the first 3d cat cam application where I saw something moving on the screen in the morning and I Put this part I saw virtually from the CNC milling machine in the afternoon and this made my, made me change my mind that now computers make sense for craftsmanship and in my, in my business, because this allowed me now to mirror, to scale, to turn something positive into a negative mold, and, and starting from that day I spend a lot of time into learning 3d technologies.
Speaker 2:Okay, but but one thing is really interesting this is the thing you touched on it that you were an apprentice. Right in America, for example, the system is you send everybody to college and then they all get kind of an education. But Germany still has this apprenticeship system, which is quite unique actually, where you literally after high school you learn, you go really really deep in learning a particular skill, um, rather than getting a broader college education. Do you think that's really valuable of you to really understand this really deep? This? This is mold making, this dye making kind of technology.
Speaker 3:I think it's not just for mold making and dye making, it's, it's the mix. So normally after high school you are qualified to go to university and for me the first intention was I want to have more practice for my Initial plan to get to study industrial design. So I want to learn more about materials, about manufacturing, and this was my initial intention. So normally you make an apprenticeship when you have the more basic school education.
Speaker 3:But I think it's a it's a important, important way of our education and our Small and medium-sized businesses here in Germany that we have these dual education. So you have your apprenticeship In craftsmanship or in in industry. Parallel to that you have school education and then sometimes you have even additional education in dedicated in institutes that go deeper into. For example, as a pattern maker, we had three courses with cnc, 3d, cat, with materials, so we learned a lot about plastics, resins and how to work with with carbon fibers, for example, and glass fibers and, and. So this was more alignment of all the apprentices to yeah, to learn everything which is necessary for this, for this business. And I think this Important is this standard that normally if you hire someone who finished an apprenticeship, you know what he should be capable.
Speaker 2:Okay, it sounds really solid. I really think more countries should look into this, especially like very technical kind of jobs that are very in demand now and I think it would be really wonderful for more people to do it. So it's also about mold and pattern making, just generally. So usually it's kind of a you know it has to be very precise or quite precise, and you're usually looking at, you know, a whole bunch of different steps, right, depending on the process, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, correct. So we started with drawings. Then of course you have to take care about the demolding. So are there undercuts or not? Where are the? Where's the optimal parting line? Then what needs to be machined after casting? So you need offsets. Then, of course, to work with tolerances. So what is the estimated shrinkage of the metal when it cools down? What is the tolerance that, for example, send cores have to fit, if you have, you might imagine, in the company where I made my apprenticeship we even made the casting patterns for Formula 1 engines and this is really artwork. So there is a team of four or five people working on two months to work on all these parts from drawing at that time. So of course, my colleagues at that time told me this will never be done with computers, but this happened much faster than they expected. But I learned a lot about materials, tolerances, manufacturing processes and the challenges sometimes you face when you have to do something manually.
Speaker 2:So then to go to CNC was already like a crazy big step right. So we're talking. That's in part this digitization as well. You know CNC, of course, very precise technology. You need a lot of operator skill, undercuts, for example. You have really problematic. How do you find like switching to CNC?
Speaker 3:This was. This was cool. So we started with simple things, just milling outlines. So it's more 2d, two and a half D, where you, where you do the, the G codes on the controller of a CNC mill. The next step was then going into 3d cat.
Speaker 3:Whereas 3d cat in 1990s was totally different to what we have today where we have full parametric historical cat systems, at that time it was surface modeling and you had a limited number of toolpath strategies. That it went to be very quickly so that in 1990, I already 1991, beginning of 1991, I started with three axis milling already in the in my last employment. And yeah, this, this is not just milling Before you have to mill. At that time we turned drawings into 3d files. So I think this is important, this was not at that time, it was not normal that you already got 3d files from your, from your customers, mostly automotive. So this started with a little bit delay afterwards. But I think the most important step was the 3d design. So the preparation for the mold on the screen, then turning this into a milling strategy, was roughing, was finishing, was selecting the right tools and how to orient the parts on the milling machine, and this was then, of course, the basis for my first 3d print as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, so first off, CAD. You know you said to yourself like it was different then, but I think you're really downplaying it a little bit because it was, of course, ridiculously slow and cumbersome and the computers were slow and it was very difficult, right.
Speaker 3:Yes, so you might remember the 286 computers or XT computers, so was not not comparable with what we have today, and when we, when the milling a tool pass, was maybe it had to fit on a very small diskette, and so the what we now know as a symbol, a item for saving, was physically available.
Speaker 2:I was once giving a training to a bunch of 12 year olds and how to 3d print right and we're using I don't know what we're using again like some program. I said like click on the disk and the kids like what's the disk? Like what is the disk? And then they had to explain to these kids what a disk was and like that there was like a little disk icon for the save and they had no idea that that thing was actually a reference to like a physical object that we use, like put stuff on there. There's looking me like really weird, like what?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and we discussed. We discussed during my apprenticeship when we had our first courses in CNC milling. We discussed because no one had a computer at home. We discussed about should we, should we buy a pre formatted disk or should we format the disk? So and we spend a lot of time into this, so which? Yeah, it was crazy.
Speaker 2:And how about like 3d modeling at the time is like where there are like a lot more constraints, that you have to wait a long time, like just the actual 3d modeling was actually also really complicated, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, because it was mostly free form surfaces, so you had to understand how you use splines and curves, turn them into faces, and then, if the next step is, then you had to design the fillets, and so this is.
Speaker 3:This was really totally different, but the benefit was that when you, when you had a more flexible design tool I used Simatron at that time and so it allows us when you knew, okay, I'm milling and my smallest tool will be maybe six millimeter diameter, and so there could have been holes in my data set.
Speaker 3:As long as they are smaller than the tool tip, there was no risk. So today, very often, you run into situations where your, your cat design fails, where maybe different surfaces connect in a strange way each other and where you would need some fillets and so on, and it didn't work. But at that time there was always okay, it was more, you had more tolerance, so it allowed you more to improvise, and I think this was this was really important at that time to learn, and it helps me a lot today when something fails in cat, especially when for my younger employees that you're okay, you have now three boundaries turned into four boundaries and then it works, and why? Okay, I can explain how it was 30 years ago or 35 years ago. And you need to have UV, uvs in the surface description, and a triangle is normally not supported by cat.
Speaker 2:Okay, and what was it? So that could have been a little bit problematic for your first 3d print, right? What was that like?
Speaker 3:This was in 1991 already.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's very, very good.
Speaker 3:So yeah, as it was SLS on a DTM laser sintering machine, so the first demo machine set up in close to the company where it worked in my last employment, and so I heard about this machine and we worked on a prototype for a roof rail carrier, and so we need the studio files. We had to mill in aluminum and steel and then there was a small cover, housing for the key, and I asked my boss at that time oh, there are some undercuts, want to try this new technology once? And I got the offer to test it for free if the parts are not too big. And so we prepared the files.
Speaker 3:The challenge at that time was because we had no solid modeling. You had to turn every patch into triangles and then you had to check if the triangles have the normals into the right direction. So you could spend several hours on the screen looking around so that you had a closed STL file. This was the first challenge, but it worked and we already learned a little bit about this, so that we exported portions of the file and we learned that at that time it was the ASCII format for STLs. You just could combine them with a batch file, which helped us to even manage larger things. But we got the parts a little bit with steps and rough. So laser sintering at that time needs still to have some smoothing and some infiltration with resin. But we were already talking about okay in the future we will no longer work on stock, we will work on demand and we will do custom parts. And this was 33 years ago so, and we are still far away from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a bit optimistic. And was it really this one defining moment Because, like a lot of people have this one moment where, like ta-da, everything changes or was it with you, just a gradual realization that, okay, wait a minute, this actually works?
Speaker 3:For me it's because I had these moments with CAT, with CNC milling, I always a little bit critical. Okay, this is what I learned now after several years that after the proof that something is possible, it might take additional 15 years for a broader acceptance of the technology. So, and in most areas or in most companies, new technologies enter the shop room when there is a switch in generation, so when someone new gets into the team and I think this was my experience there and I had to fight against some of my colleagues in that last company because we introduced was a colleague we introduced the whole 3D technology with CAT, with milling, cnc, 3d, cnc milling and, yeah, we just somehow hijacked the shop room.
Speaker 2:That's really cool. And then did you see it more and more. Or did you really have to specialize before, like you could really see more 3D printed stuff? When did you really start doing this kind of like full time?
Speaker 3:Oh, I think this, this started more. So I founded my own company on New Year's Eve in 1994, so 30 years ago now and in the beginning it was just service providing. So the same what I did in my last employment 3D CAT design drawings into 3D files and we offered even the toolpath calculation. So we introduced the CNC milling 3-axis CNC milling into smaller shop rooms and we offered 3D design services even for bigger companies in their product development. And I think we went more and more into 3D printing when, yeah, the need for prototypes increased. So I purchased my first 3D printer in 2008. It's an object even from, yeah, now Stratasys 260V. So this was the birthday present for my wife.
Speaker 2:She was really happy it was 30,000. She was 30,000 at the time.
Speaker 3:Well, a little bit more, a little bit more much more, much more.
Speaker 2:So I think it was 70,000. Oh, no, yeah, the one that broke all the time, yeah it's still working.
Speaker 1:It's still working.
Speaker 3:And yes, and, but before that I used external service providers. When we went into figurative stuff, so for toy designers, and we worked for some toy companies here in Germany and when we worked on new prototypes and we had some changes, then, just for the approval, we used 3D printing, and so this was. I think we started with that already in 2004, 2005.
Speaker 2:Okay, and then we don't really talk about this polyjet right Now. This is a technology that uses inkjet, an extrusion of a resonance and flash of the UV, and then you get a model that has like kind of like a hair gel kind of consistency, support material inside of it. Let's say, was that easy to use in the beginning, because you know it's a really expensive?
Speaker 1:material yes.
Speaker 3:This was really the decision that when we worked more with at that time, even with dental customers, so that we printed 3D models for dentures and we went into feasibility studies there, and I think the benefit of those systems was you just load the STL file of your shape. It takes all the systems intelligence for support and the only thing is the material was really is still really expensive, but the precision is high. So they have 16 micron layers and 600 DPI resolution in the flat surface and it allows us really to print hours without any problems. And so we used it a lot for this organic design stuff. And this was maybe when we searched for additional 3D design tools that allowed us to turn those shapes into digital manufacturing that has been formally used by copy milling and maybe working with resin molds with some hand sculpting tasks.
Speaker 3:And this was our challenge when we went more from away from automotive general machining industry into what we call organic or anatomic shapes. So in the beginning it has been glass molds, figurative stuff, so the US people know Goreham, Lenox and maybe all this kitschy glass stuff figurines for Christmas trees and I made some angels and dolphins as candle lights and crazy stuff, but we made. We turned weeks into days for finishing the design and turning this into a steel mold at the beginning, and then we used already 3D printing for the approval of the necessary changes to make things mold.
Speaker 2:Okay, that already saved weeks. And when did you? Did you stay with OB yet for a long time, or did you go into other technologies, or what did you use?
Speaker 3:We have now two printers RACE Pro 2 and Pro 3, and we have a NetMaker, but those devices are more for feasibility studies, for demo projects and for supporting some customers that use the same printers for in-house. Of course, externally we use all the other things like laser centering, multi-jet fusion and even, if necessary, metal printing, Since we switched more from a 3D CAD service provider or CADCAM service provider more into a solution provider. So since 2003-2004 we started to sell products we use in-house. Our major product is GeoMagic Freeform, which in the beginning was our solution to turn this handcrafted models and shapes into manufacturing where normal CAD really fails. This was our Swiss knife and the secret tool that solved the problems. From there we went into more and more projects where customers purchased the same products we use, so that at that time the sensible salespeople asked us if we don't want to become reseller of those products because we have been more successful with our feasibility studies and projects than they have been with our sales team. And I think this is now the key of our business and our long-term success so that we use the manufacturing background, then know how we have from materials and how things get processed and then we teach customers how to turn their ideas into 3D designs and use the right manufacturing technology.
Speaker 3:For us, it's not just 3D printing. We are talking more about digital manufacturing. If something is cheaper to mill, we recommend milling. If something is simple enough to make a mold, then it makes sense to make a mold. This can be 3D printed as well. But if things get more and more demanding on shapes and when you want to design around functionality, then of course 3D printing is the way to go.
Speaker 1:with all the materials we are getting and the freedom of design we are now having, so design side of the business, I guess you would say when you say that you moved to free form because some of the CAD tools were failing you, what do you mean by that? And I think it's just a real important thing for our audience to grasp on. Cad tools doesn't necessarily mean you are going to have a good product. There's definitely some other options and you called free form the secret weapon. So I'd love for you to expand on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the thing is we know how to handle 3D tools, that we learn a lot from our customers about their processes and about their needs and, of course, and about their timelines. So, especially in craftsmanship you know this from orthotics and prosthetics it makes no sense to do the classical CAD way to scan something, to do a classical reverse engineering and try to use somehow bad surfaces in CAD to re-scout them, to bend the data and to reduce the data, maybe to shrink them. In CAD. There is no tool to do something a little bit or to smooth something a little bit, and a little bit is something you can't measure. This is something you have to. Yeah, it's a subjective things, so it's based on experience and no one can tell you how many digits. And I think where you know or where we, for example, look, which tools are they using?
Speaker 3:The best preparation for a totally unexperienced CPO when he wants to go into digital is that he takes some notes, pictures, records on his traditional manual workflow. So how does he take a cast? Where does he take care about the position, the angles, where he compress and where he corrects Then when he makes the positive? So where he removes material, where he adds material? Which tools are they using? And these are rasps, these are shapers.
Speaker 3:And I think this is important that in CAD, to define, to get to the similar shapes just with surfacing, extrusion and some other tools is very, very abstract and it's not the digital way of sculpting. And I think CAD is more a technical approach which makes sense, especially for parts and objects with a long life cycle, where it makes sense to have a lot of connections between the data so that there is a real parametric tree, and where all these things with constraints are connected. But when you do a part, a single part which is for one individual and it will be done once, Of course you will do a similar process a second time, but there is. You need a very, very effective way to get this organic shape ready for manufacturing. And when you need to smooth something quickly, there is no surface tool which allows you to do this.
Speaker 2:I think that's a really really good point. I think it's a really really good point, especially for OMP and for you, like you know. So you came from this very engineering background. What was it like for you working in OMP? Was it crazy in the beginning? Was it like what are these people? This is a journey for me. It's like what are they doing? It's like art and artisan and engineering and medical. It's like this crazy mix. Did you find that too? It's very compelling, but also very strange, right?
Speaker 3:This was funny because in the beginning it was more like OK, I always saw my job a little bit like a challenge. So when someone claims this is not possible, I take this personal and try to find the way how to make this happen. So we really this is one of our motos we try to make the impossible possible. And one one when we want deeper into orthotics and prosthetics. This happened at one Euro mold, I think in 2007 or 2008. So I got a visitor on our booth. We had been exhibitor there already. So a visitor came to our booth and he asked me OK, we are CPOs and we are considering to go deeper into digital manufacturing and we think that you might be the right partner to support us. We know you have no background in prosthetics and orthotics, but we know you have a good background in manufacturing and you are creative and open-minded. And OK, we made an appointment and I had to prove that we are able to 3D scan a gypsum cast of a lac. Then they asked me OK, take this 3D file, show us some tools, how you can offset, how you can modify, how you can change the shape. And then at that time we were not directly talking about 3D printing it was more milling at that time and then let this 3D data set be milled, and then we want to compare the cast with the 3D milled result.
Speaker 3:First challenge was that I asked a company, a friend of mine, ok can you do the milling for me? And I got the milled part and it was a totally different size, and I asked him what went wrong and he told me oh, we didn't have the big machine available, so I scaled down the data set that it fits to the machine, and then I had to explain him that this is exactly what he should not do. We can split this into two parts to mill it on the small machine and glue it together or assemble it somehow, but it's very, very important that the data we use now for manufacturing really fit 100% to the original shapes. And so we then made a presentation about this result and we got the go. And then the big challenge for me was a two-day workshop with 12 master CPOs that gave me a crash course in orthotics and prosthetics, and they were really highly engaged. This was really impressive, and so they explained me different types of foot orthotics and of spine orthotics of helmets, and one task was the individual seat foams for wheelchairs. And while they told me how they do it manually, I demonstrated what's possible digitally.
Speaker 3:And this was the initial content for the first courses we offered them and we helped them to find milling machines and we helped them to find the right milling tools and materials, first to substitute the heavy gypsum cast against a milled foam part. And then, obviously, the next step was naturally they go into 3D printing, and so there was a. Of course there was a delay of maybe four or five years, but at that time it was very important that they started first to turn the 3D scan into a good working digital cast model and mill it and do the vacuum forming so that they trust the digital workflow. And then, of course, next step was more like okay, when it gets more complicated, they went into 3D printing and for us it's parallel. Now it looks quite different. Now we have more new customers, prospects that have already some people with more computer experience and with some 3D background and they want to go into 3D printing directly.
Speaker 2:Do you have any advice for, like imagine I'm a CPL and I want to do the whole scan to 3D print kind of workflow. Do you have any advice on these people how to get started and how to do that successfully?
Speaker 3:Very important is what? What did we learn from those who started twice or three times? So the important thing is that you have first a plan. So when do you want to, or in which area do you want to, go digital? First, and very, very important, take care that you have time and free capacities for this. So the introduce, the introducing 3D technologies is nothing that you can do very, very quickly aside of your full time job. So you have to spend time for this minimum one day per week for introduction and then start with simple cases, maybe Arfos that are not too big for failures.
Speaker 3:And very important, what we learned and this was one of the biggest challenge and we found a way, I think, a cool idea they have when you go into 3D printing you substitute your traditional material with new materials and there is no background about these new materials, no experience, and we want to prevent the bad experience that most critical people in the team they are happy when something fails, but we learned there is. It's very, very important that they get a feeling, a haptic feeling, of the material. So to support this training, we developed a data set for five shells of a alpha design that fit to each other like a Russian Matushka puppet, so you can slip each one over the other was one millimeter gap, and those this data set can be printed in one build job, so it has the expenses of a single daffle or alpha and delivers you now the information. Okay, this is how this material behaves in one millimeter thickness 1.25, 1.52 and 2.5 millimeters, so they can bend it. They can see how it acts where you are flat. They can check how it's when you have concave, convex areas where it's got get more rigid and how there's a perforated area there.
Speaker 3:You see how this flexes and what we recommend is that they use this data set and ask their intended service provider to make prints with all the available materials so that they can test internally and check. Okay, we now substitute polypropylene, two millimeters with PA 11, 1.5 millimeters, for example, and they can discuss with the same samples with physiotherapists and with the clinics as well. So for us, it's very, very important to that, before they invest into own printers, they need to learn to design and they need to learn about the available materials. So it's just like getting a first. You need the driving license and you make, have to make the content before you buy a car. So this is our, our recommendation.
Speaker 2:I think that's a really really good advice. I think it's really solid, I mean, and a lot of people just jump in there by a giant machine or or just try to jump in there with critical stuff right away. I think it's really. I think your method seems to be much, much better. Also, one of these really interesting I've looked at your website and you guys sell scanners and it's really interesting that you guys sell, Well, our tech scanners, which I think for some applications, especially body scanners like the spider and the Arctic Leo and stuff, are some of the gold standards to get us there. The Arctic Leo is insane but ridiculous expensive as well. And you also resell shining iron scanners, right, because and those are really quite inexpensive and and those are actually also the two that I would recommend, and also happen to know that, from a completely different basis, brent also likes both those families of scanners, like you know. Is that just a coincidence? You like the same ones as well.
Speaker 3:It depends on. So there are two things Historically, the Arctic scanners have been available before shining and therefore of course we started with Eva and with space fighter and later with Leo. And of course Arctic has a very, very successful software development so that, for example, get shapes captured with Eva, even a 10 year old Eva, which have been impossible in the past, so that due to a software update you get, yeah, like a new scanner. So Arctic is very successful on the software side. But on the other hand, we did a lot of trials and we have been joining a research project where we tested, I think, around 20 different scanners and we took a reference scan with a out gum out of scanner which is used for quality control in automotive, and we scanned to manikas and then with every scanner we got, every one of my team had to make five scans and we compared all the scans. We took a look at the cheaper structure sensors on the iPad. We took a look at all the shining scanners and Calibri and the Arctic scanners, so not just the products we sell.
Speaker 3:And then of course you recognize okay what is the expectation on the scanner and what is the budget available to introduce the technology, and sometimes the budget is limited and then, of course, it makes more sense to buy a cheaper scanner and combine it with free form to have the full data set for your digital shop room, instead of buying just an expensive scanner and have no design capacities. And I think this is important. We think that in the future you will have different scanners with different focus on the use. So this is when you have to go mobile. You might use a Leo, because every scan is successful, or maybe something mobile which arises in the near future, so there are new things coming on the market.
Speaker 3:And then, of course, if you are stationary, it might be much faster to work with a wired scanner because the data are immediately on your laptop. To finalize the data and I think it depends a little bit on how flexible should the scanner be used and we benchmark scanners and when it makes sense for us, we purchase them, even for us in-house. And obviously then we are interested to sell those products as well, to share the knowledge we gained with those tools. But there is not just the one right scanner. So even ARTEX scanning can be complex and other devices. If they deliver the same precision as needed for us, a full package might be even an Einstein with your magic free form.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think that's a really good sound device on the scanning as well. Hey, Antonius, thank you so much for being here today. This is absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 3:Thank you, you're welcome.
Speaker 2:And Brent, thank you for being here as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, this was great, and thank you, antonius, for sharing your knowledge to those like me as well, and so I love seeing the stuff that you're up to and I love collaborating to whatever extent that looks like, but it's fun and we have so much more to get into, so it's up to you, but I think we'd watch you back.
Speaker 2:No, we totally won't.
Speaker 3:You should have taken a picture of my table. So I put a lot of samples on the table and so if we had used the camera, we could have shared some images and you got a rough idea about these sample sets, for example, and yeah, maybe we make another podcast.
Speaker 1:I think that's in the cards for sure, so we'll see about getting that set up for the new year. I think that would be great because there's so much more that you know that we didn't cover. But yeah, I really appreciate your time. This was great and it's a perfect segue and it's a perfect amount of information for our listeners.
Speaker 3:To go to the next level, I really invite you all to visit us at the OT World in Leipzig next year in. May. So this is where we have a large booth with a presentation stage and where we really go deeper into this and try to explain the products we offer.
Speaker 2:Awesome, sounds good. Hey, thanks everybody for listening to the prosthetics and orthotics podcast and I hope you enjoy this wonderful episode as much as we did.